Ecotopia.: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston.

Berkeley, California: Banyan Tree Books,, 1975. Uncommon inscribed First edition, first printing, inscribed in red ink on the initial blank, "For Tee, with love, Chick". Ecotopia, a cult favourite and one of the first ecological utopias ever written, was highly influential on 1970s counterculture and the sustainability movement. A widely admired futuristic novel by the American film scholar and environmentalist Ernest "Chick" Callenbach (1929-2012), Ecotopia was strangely prescient and remarkably rational in its predictions of the ways in which toxic living could threaten health and sustainability. It was self-published in an initial run of 2,500 copies, with Callenbach remembering that "it was rejected by every significant publisher in New York... Some said it didn't have enough sex and violence, or that they couldn't tell if it were a novel or a tract. Somebody said the ecology trend was over" (quoted in the NYT). After an excerpt in Harper's Weekly was favourably received, Bantam decided to publish the next edition. Ralph Nader, who later endorsed the book in a blurb, remarked: "It came out at just the right time in terms of the environmental movement... Environmentalists had been focusing on pollution inversions, rivers catching fire because of oil slicks, things like that. His book took it to a different level of possibility... and broadened the meaning of ecology" (quoted in The Washington Post). Octavo. Original colour pictorial wrappers, perfect bound. Lightly rubbed. A near-fine copy. Scott Timberg, "The Novel That Predicted Portland", New York Times, 12 December 2008; Elaine Woo, "Ernest 'Chick' Callenbach wrote 'Ecotopia,' an influential novel about an environmental utopia", The Washington Post, 25 April 2012.